Bootstrapping Urbit from Ethereum

For those confused about Urbit's value proposition, I recommend Isaac Simpson's briefish explanation here. Funny enough, the original version was posted behind Medium's membership paywall, and the public link was just recently distributed:

https://storage.googleapis.com/urbit-extra/etc/the%20not%20so%20dark%20future%20-%20isaac%20simpson.pdf ↗

My own perspective regarding these new decentralized platforms is that we're at the very tail end of low-hanging fruit in regards how easy the next generation of software innovation will be to explain to "your average layperson". The problems that decentralization are trying to solve are uniquely understood by developers, particularly people well-versed in the metagame of content, advertising, identity, and privacy on the web, which is a vast field filled with thousands of great reasons to consider decentralization, but are unfortunately hard to distill down into a 30-second elevator soundbyte.

Another problem is that having high-density conversations about software innovation is fundamentally absurd. Every software innovation is ultimately just "another way to write code", so you can boil down everything Urbit and IPFS and Ethereum are doing to "well, our current code for everything is this way, and it seems to suck, so we're going to try writing the code a completely new way". That's it. Every time someone asks "what can you even do with this thing?", the answer is "well, you can develop software on it".

Edit: Apparently the original article has been un-paywalled. Perhaps you can access it here:

https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future-of-the-internet-400c9b667e2 ↗

I'm still very confused about urbit, but think it's quite interesting to follow. I found that this video explains it reasonably well. Watch it from 6:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md4boH1eZvc ↗

This snippet also helps:

Making the web programmable

The first thing your Urbit can do is act as a transparent layer to your existing services. We’d like urbit to be usable as a self-hosted IFTTT for geeks. Your urbit can hold your keys, store data, run programs and seamlessly connect to your existing services. Plus, with a global revision controlled filesystem it’s easy to share API connectors and keep them up to date.

With an Urbit running on your machine you can ls your Gmail from Unix. Write a short script to poll Twitter on a keyword and deliver the results to your email or into a Slack channel. Send an SMS when an HTTP request doesn’t resolve. These are just a few examples. Your Urbit is designed to make data trapped in your existing services feel like an extension of your local programming environment.

https://urbit.org/posts/vision/ ↗

Every time I read something about Urbit I am reminded of the Lewis Padgett short sci-fi story, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves" [0], [1] describing children discovering alien future toys, and subsequently via use of those toys learning to manipulate reality in incomprehensible ways.

I still have not been able to figure out if there's actually something that amazing about Urbit, or if behind the obfuscated terminology there's nothing, and I am reluctant to commit to the time required to find out for myself. It doesn't help that people who spend time in that land seem to all forget how to speak about it except in the terms of Urbit, unable to translate it for laypeople. I suppose that's true about any highly technical subject though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves ↗

[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC&lpg=PA181&dq=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&pg=PA181#v=onepage&q=mimsy%20were%20the%20borogoves&f=false ↗

To everyone either 1) comparing it to some sci-fi text or 2) saying it is unparsable: It is no accident. This is written like a religious text.

I am not kidding. It might have came out like this by accident, but i could spend days mapping the semiotics of this to, say, scientology "books".

The most blatant technique there is the slightly out of place technical terms and insertion of sci-fi elements. Here is a paper on christian texts and the use of metaphor on the willingness of the audience http://cogprints.org/4863/1/Cognitive_Semiotics_and_On-Line_Reading_of_Religious_Texts.pdf ↗

Huh, apparently the creator[1] of Urbit is one of the original folks behind the very gross dark enlightenment school of thought, and also associated with Peter Thiel through his startup. Well, that saps my interest in the project rather quickly. I'm sure there will be alternatives from people whose principles I'd actually be happy to support.

I strongly believe in voting with my attention and/or money against ideals that are abhorrent to me, so I thought I'd put it out there for others in the same boat.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin ↗